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Language: English
A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE
BY WILLIAM JAMES
1909
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
LECTURE II
MONISTIC IDEALISM 41
LECTURE III
LECTURE IV
LECTURE V
LECTURE VI
LECTURE VII
LECTURE VIII
CONCLUSIONS 301
NOTES 333
APPENDICES
INDEX 401
LECTURE I
The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth
the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us
english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.
Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be
thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal
change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the
older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was
religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism
derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german
technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain
vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.
But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised
empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave
prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the better--I hope to
have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this
lecture-course.
All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some
one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless
prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that
they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at
bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better
be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than
another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting
but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play
our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth
century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they
want to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely
bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest
the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home
in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very different
fragments of the world.
I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But
if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not
find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to
our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is
the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged
to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one
hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei st�cke,' as Kant would have said,
in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which
it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and
mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed
be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true
without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation.
What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is _reasoned_.
Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common
men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They
jump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must
do more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to the
professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license
is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular
beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose,
for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will.
That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief,
possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man
to the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associated
with such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular
premises on which the free-will he believes in is established, the
sense in which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficulties
it takes account of, in short the whole form and temper and manner
and technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question.
A philosopher across the way who should use the same technical
apparatus, making the same distinctions, etc., but drawing opposite
conclusions and denying free-will entirely, would fascinate the first
philosopher far more than would the _na�f_ co-believer. Their common
technical interests would unite them more than their opposite
conclusions separate them. Each would feel an essential consanguinity
in the other, would think of him, write _at_ him, care for his good
opinion. The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded
by either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted.
Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about
him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's?
A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all
definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions
of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted
the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by
various living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic
personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a
photograph album.
But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for
generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those
divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather
to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has
contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers
emphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginary
supplements.
Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from the
clash between what I lately called the sympathetic and the cynical
temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival
types that result: the former defining the world so as to leave man's
soul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien, while the latter
insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the
brutal. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking.
Now there are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic
philosophy, and my next purpose in this lecture is to make their
contrast evident. Both types attain the sought-for intimacy of view,
but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other.
The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sorts
of other divisions, drawn from other points of view than that of
foreignness and intimacy. We have so many different businesses with
nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. The
philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left
out, so that no one lies outside the door saying 'Where do _I_ come
in?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a philosophy can hope for is
not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it closes,
it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects.
I have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness
because that makes so generally interesting a contrast, and because it
will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which I wish this
hour to lead.
The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially
considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct
from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy
of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical
with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just _is_ our
philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of
knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague
Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious
moment.
But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance,
that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of it, yet in a
formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When we speak of
the absolute we _take_ the one universal known material collectively
or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of our finite selves,
etc., we _take_ that same identical material distributively and
separately. But what is the use of a thing's _being_ only once if it
can be _taken_ twice over, and if being taken in different ways makes
different things true of it? As the absolute takes me, for example, I
appear _with_ everything else in its field of perfect knowledge. As
I take myself, I appear _without_ most other things in my field
of relative ignorance. And practical differences result from its
knowledge and my ignorance. Ignorance breeds mistake, curiosity,
misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those consequences. The absolute
knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering,
but it doesn't itself suffer. It can't be ignorant, for simultaneous
with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer.
It can't be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything
at once in its possession. It can't be surprised; it can't be guilty.
No attribute connected with succession can be applied to it, for it
is all at once and wholly what it is, 'with the unity of a single
instant,' and succession is not of it but in it, for we are
continually told that it is 'timeless.'
Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of
it in its infinite capacity. _Qu�_ finite and plural its accounts of
itself to itself are different from what its account to itself _qu�_
infinite and one must be.
With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative
points of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy
between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which
we found in monarchical theism, and hoped that pantheism might not
show. We humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view.
The eternal's ways are utterly unlike our ways. 'Let us imitate the
All,' said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterly
called the 'Monist.' As if we could, either in thought or conduct!
We are invincibly parts, let us talk as we will, and must always
apprehend the absolute as if it were a foreign being. If what I mean
by this is not wholly clear to you at this point, it ought to grow
clearer as my lectures proceed.
LECTURE II
MONISTIC IDEALISM
First, one word more than what I said last time about the relative
foreignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute.
Those of you who have read the last two chapters of Mr. Bradley's
wonderful book, 'Appearance and reality,' will remember what an
elaborately foreign aspect _his_ absolute is finally made to assume.
It is neither intelligence nor will, neither a self nor a collection
of selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as we understand
these terms. It is, in short, a metaphysical monster, all that we are
permitted to say of it being that whatever it is, it is at any rate
_worth_ more (worth more to itself, that is) than if any eulogistic
adjectives of ours applied to it. It is us, and all other appearances,
but none of us _as such_, for in it we are all 'transmuted,' and its
own as-suchness is of another denomination altogether.
Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and the impossibility of being
intimate with _his_ God is universally recognized. _Quatenus infinitus
est_ he is other than what he is _quatenus humanam mentem constituit_.
Spinoza's philosophy has been rightly said to be worked by the word
_quatenus_. Conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs play indeed the
vital part in all philosophies; and in contemporary idealism the words
'as' and 'qu�' bear the burden of reconciling metaphysical unity with
phenomenal diversity. Qu� absolute the world is one and perfect, qu�
relative it is many and faulty, yet it is identically the self-same
world--instead of talking of it as many facts, we call it one fact in
many aspects.
The words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single real
being M, of which _a_ and _b_ are members, is the only thing that
changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and all over at
once. When part _a_ in it changes, consequently, part _b_ must also
change, but without the whole M changing this would not occur.
But I ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many'
makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any
better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all
together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility
and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the
possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by
which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point
of fact abstract oneness as such _doesn't_ change, neither has it
parts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then
neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence _exists_; only
concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other
properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total
nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as _making their
total nature impossible_ is a misuse of the function of naming. The
real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not
to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct
the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness
to the case. Don't take your 'independence' _simpliciter_, as Lotze
does, take it _secundum quid_. Only when we know what the process of
interaction literally and concretely _consists_ in can we tell whether
beings independent _in definite respects_, distinct, for example, in
origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot
interact.
_The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the
name's definition fails positively to include, is what I call
'vicious intellectualism_.' Later I shall have more to say about this
intellectualism, but that Lotze's argument is tainted by it I hardly
think we can deny. As well might you contend (to use an instance from
Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is
thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.
Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt
the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make
no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject
cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even
be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,--this assumption, I
say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd
practical consequence that the two beings _can_ never later acquire
any possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if
in different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the
king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links
before it could connect them, and so on _ad infinitum_, the argument,
you see, being the same as Lotze's about how _a_'s influence does its
influencing when it influences _b_.
In Royce's own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him,
then king and cat 'can have no common features, no ties, no true
relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely
impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community
of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor
in the same natural or spiritual order.'[7] They form in short two
unrelated universes,--which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ required.
Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the
king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly
put as follows:--
First, to know the king, the cat must intend _that_ king, must somehow
pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat's
idea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehow
include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of
the cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could touch the king
in no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from the king than
we had at first na�vely supposed. There must be some prior continuity
between them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically as
meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning them
can also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that may
obtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them can
own any part of a _between_, because, so taken, each is supposed shut
up to itself: the fact of a _between_ thus commits us to a higher
knower.
But the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves
to be the same knower that knows everything else. For assume any third
being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king
know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning,
require a higher knower as its presupposition. That knower of the
king's knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower
that was required for the cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the _same king_. This may not seem immediately
obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all
these reasonings, I don't see how you can escape the admission. If it
be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for
the abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no
relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat
cannot be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as such,'
the abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what
knows the queen' are logically distinct. The king thus logically
breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher
knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned
in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about.
This he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects
and can treat them as he will. Add any fourth or fifth term, and you
get a like result, and so on, until at last an all-owning knower,
otherwise called the absolute, is reached. The co-implicated
'through-and-through' world of monism thus stands proved by
irrefutable logic, and all pluralism appears as absurd.
How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the
logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:
'But surely, SURELY there must be _some_ connexion among things!' As
if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying
any connexion whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth
about the word 'some.' Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for
the legitimacy of the notion of _some_: each part of the world is in
some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are
obvious, and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its
side, seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected
with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly
consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are 'all' and 'none.'
The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr.
Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us
abundantly familiar--the question, namely, whether all the relations
with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its
intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to
some of these relations, it can _be_ without reference to them, and,
if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it
were by an after-thought. This is the great question as to whether
'external' relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My
manuscript, for example, is 'on' the desk. The relation of being 'on'
doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning
of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk--these objects
engage in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary
accident in their respective histories. Moreover, the 'on' fails to
appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that
have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.
All this innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass
muster in the eyes of reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction
which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into
the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.
All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owed
their inspiration largely to him. Even when they have found no use
for his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidence
and courage from his authoritative and conquering tone. I have said
nothing about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission in
the next.
LECTURE III
It is still more curious in that these same disciples, altho they are
usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic
method to its critics, are unshakably sure that in some shape the
dialectic method is the key to truth. What, then, is the dialectic
method? It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and
a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense.
Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a
reasoner. He is in reality a na�vely observant man, only beset with a
perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon. He
plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression
of what happens. His mind is in very truth _impressionistic_; and his
thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is
the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.
Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision. From
the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are
comparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontological
proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the _ens
perfectissimum_ to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'It
would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in
a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough
to embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most
abstract of all--for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.'
But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits
of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult
to follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences,
his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful
vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation,' for
example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking
logic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy
of ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make his
present-day readers wish to tear their hair--or his--out in
desperation. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name 'to other times,
linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.'
The virtue was the vision, which was really in two parts. The first
part was that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things
are 'dialectic.' Let me say a word about this second part of Hegel's
vision.
The impression that any _na�f_ person gets who plants himself
innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.
Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but
provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian
equilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical,
break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life
and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas
frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the
universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special
system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as
sacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite
for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood
for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone. This dogging of
everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual
moving on to something future which shall supersede the present,
this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and
consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. Take any
concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for so
held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract or
abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality.
The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together,
and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the world
tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning
it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about anything
involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the whole
of everything can be the truth of anything at all.
Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, but
accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it please
you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life
establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in
terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in
the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic
empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding
world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its
rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by
compromising some part of its original pretensions.
What he did with the category of negation was his most original
stroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through
the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same. Hegel
felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; he
saw that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had the
brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance
from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of
thought. 'The so-called maxim of identity,' he wrote, 'is supposed to
be accepted by the consciousness of every one. But the language which
such a law demands, "a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism,
mind is mind," deserves to be called silliness. No mind either speaks
or thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and no
existence of any kind whatever conforms to it. We must never view
identity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference.
That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what
alone deserves the name of philosophy. If thinking were no more than
registering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluous
performance. Things and concepts are identical with themselves only in
so far as at the same time they involve distinction.'[1]
The distinction that Hegel has in mind here is naturally in the first
instance distinction from all other things or concepts. But in his
hands this quickly develops into contradiction of them, and finally,
reflected back upon itself, into self-contradiction; and the immanent
self-contradictoriness of all finite concepts thenceforth becomes the
propulsive logical force that moves the world.[2] 'Isolate a thing
from all its relations,' says Dr. Edward Caird,[3] expounding Hegel,
'and try to assert it by itself; you find that it has negated itself
as well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing.' Or, to
quote Hegel's own words: 'When we suppose an existent A, and another,
B, B is at first defined as the other. But A is just as much the other
of B. Both are others in the same fashion.... "Other" is the other by
itself, therefore the other of every other, consequently the other of
itself, the simply unlike itself, the self-negator, the self-alterer,'
etc.[4] Hegel writes elsewhere: 'The finite, as implicitly other than
what it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being,
and to turn suddenly into its opposite.... Dialectic is the universal
and irresistible power before which nothing can stay.... _Summum jus,
summa injuria_--to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit
injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one
another. Pride comes before a fall. Too much wit outwits itself. Joy
brings tears, melancholy a sardonic smile.'[5] To which one well
might add that most human institutions, by the purely technical and
professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by
becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in
view.
Once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are lucky
if you ever get away from it. It is all you can see. Let any one
pronounce anything, and your feeling of a contradiction being implied
becomes a habit, almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize by
a stereotyped gesture the position, sublation, and final reinstatement
involved. If you say 'two' or 'many,' your speech betrayeth you, for
the very name collects them into one. If you express doubt, your
expression contradicts its content, for the doubt itself is not
doubted but affirmed. If you say 'disorder,' what is that but a
certain bad kind of order? if you say 'indetermination,' you are
determining just _that_. If you say 'nothing but the unexpected
happens,' the unexpected becomes what you expect. If you say 'all
things are relative,' to what is the all of them itself relative? If
you say 'no more,' you have said more already, by implying a region
in which no more is found; to know a limit as such is consequently
already to have got beyond it; And so forth, throughout as many
examples as one cares to cite.
Whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided, and negates its other,
which, being equally one-sided, negates _it_; and, since this
situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together,
according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both
appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that
higher concept of situation in thought.
Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again
and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting
the same system. The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played
by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.
Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, _Does the
absolute exist or not_? to which all our previous discussion has been
preliminary. I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd
or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the _venue_, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?
The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make
the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in all
these respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject
its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally,
the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of
conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the
type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that
whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic
hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality
unsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one
coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at
first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which
will yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, it
may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any
action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of
exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty
that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic
tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting
and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the
absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively
perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that
those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously
have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain
elements in it.
The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven
by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.
On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem
of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it
by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to
keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though
we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could
acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never
just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the
absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which
nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from
within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a
spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as
the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is
the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever
sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that
the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing
things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality
acutely, and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which
the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else
in their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains
a puzzle, both intellectually and morally.
And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesis
of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth,' he
calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all
things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in
its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a
self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,--he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fons
et origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he
concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form
of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed
attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid
as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy
is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.
I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.
First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.
I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
caches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the caches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.
LECTURE IV
CONCERNING FECHNER
But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?
This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly
grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.
This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is
here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality,
explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see
how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim's monistic system of
truth rests on an even slenderer point.--_I have never doubted_,'
he says, 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete,' and he candidly confesses
the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate
certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short,
no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all
the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents. The
psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.
What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see
in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose
thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.
All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and
sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one
with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen,
and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.
The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The
entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must
the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the
consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry
system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that _is_, materially considered, then that whole system,
along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely
totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of
God.
I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's
speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have
been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the
detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he
employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions
can be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is due
altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the
multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the
cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the
ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the
sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he
gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who in
fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the
common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.
What are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here? If
we look more carefully into them, Fechner points out that the earth
possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we. He considers in
detail the points of difference between us, and shows them all to
make for the earth's higher rank. I will touch on only a few of these
points.
Long ago the earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higher
class of being than either man or animal; not only quantitatively
greater, like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant, but a being
whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life. Our
animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to
and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only
our defect. What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, with
restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
of ourselves. But the earth is no such cripple; why should she who
already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue,
have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself?
What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck, with
no head to carry? of eyes or nose when she finds her way through space
without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to
guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the
flowers that grow? For, as we are ourselves a part of the earth, so
our organs are her organs. She is, as it were, eye and ear over her
whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and
hears at once. She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon
her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each
other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.
Most of us, considering the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is
animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy
too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a
sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What
corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect
functions which she already performs through us, to be performed
outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly
well how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlike
our way. If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heart
when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all
the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What need
has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in
living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?
The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the
consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.--Can there be
consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, which
primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a function which the earth
performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other
stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in
its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in
its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty
mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the
clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption,
awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to
take any note.
For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special
brain than she needs eyes or ears. _Our_ brains do indeed unify and
correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our
ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light
together, and compare them. We account for this by the fibres which in
the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre, but just how
these fibres bring together not only the sensations, but the centres,
we fail to see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that
trick, has not the earth pathways, by which you and I are physically
continuous, more than enough to do for our two minds what the
brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind? Must every
higher means of unification between things be a literal _brain_-fibre,
and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents
of our minds together?
Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean of
ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not
have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming
without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as
by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they
inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one
another, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, and
harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?
Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light,
needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands. So, if the heavens really
are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures _there_ are none. Yes! the earth is our great
common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.
'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were
green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment
of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it
seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear
a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and
flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so
at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and
carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how
the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life
so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels
above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them
nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The
earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in
mineralogical cabinets.'[2]
His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be
like. He called it 'Nanna.' In the development of animals the nervous
system is the central fact. Plants develop centrifugally, spread their
organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no
consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous
system provides. But the plant's consciousness may be of another type,
being connected with other structures. Violins and pianos give out
sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound? How then about flutes and organ-pipes?
Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the
consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with
the kind of organization that | they possess. Nutrition, respiration,
propagation take place in them without nerves. In us these functions
are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is
eclipsed by that which goes with the brain. No such eclipse occurs in
plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more
lively. With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their
leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw
the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer
if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the
flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life
take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely
and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does
the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light,
relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to
the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering
or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has
the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive
part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the
mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither
run away nor cry out. But this only proves how different their modes
of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and
ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode
of feeling life at all.
I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who
have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more
general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like
reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner's with
which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his
belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere
sum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of
our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms
together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes
and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate
knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of
our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects
proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too
narrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with
each other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from each
other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world is
not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life
had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure,
permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might
always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the
wider.
We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet
the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon
the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has
happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--so
our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as
memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of
the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we
ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer
isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems,
entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive
experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their
turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.
If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a
common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own
exists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, when
it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.
--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thus
is the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think you
will admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the other
philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner and
Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent
parts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all the
other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds
between us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively
identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as
unperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thus
superior to the distributive form. But having reached this result,
Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to
me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary
idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the
more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.
But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.
LECTURE V
Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.
Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2
and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.
In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.
For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for
doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of
a whole to its parts. If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also. The great transcendentalist
metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical
sentence. Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses,
these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if
suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each
word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to
our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole
sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause,
a word, a syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said, mere
syllables in the mouth of Allah. And as Allah comes first in the order
of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the _logos_ that forms
the eternal absolute thought. Students of language tell us that speech
began with men's efforts to make _statements_. The rude synthetic
vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped,
and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts. It is not
as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then
made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;--they actually
followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the
complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and
we finite creatures _are_ only in so far as it owns us as its verbal
fragments.
So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.
The idealists in question ought then to do one of two things, but they
do neither. They ought either to refute the notion that as mental
states appear, so they are; or, still keeping that notion, they
ought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work of
the all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popular
philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a
joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If
our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our
billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts.
But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active
principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having,
as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some disciples
speak of the transcendental ego of apperception (which they celebrate
as Kant's most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were a combining
agent, the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the direction
of treating it as only an all-witness, whose field of vision we finite
witnesses do not cause, but constitute rather. We are the letters, it
is the alphabet; we are the features, it is the face; not indeed as if
either alphabet or face were something additional to the letters or
the features, but rather as if it were only another name for the very
letters or features themselves. The all-form assuredly differs from
the each-form, but the _matter_ is the same in both, and the each-form
only an unaccountable appearance.
The way out (unless, indeed, we are willing to discard the logic of
identity altogether) would seem to be frankly to write down the all
and the eaches as two distinct orders of witness, each minor witness
being aware of its own 'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole content pooled together,
knows their relations to one another, and knows of just how much each
one of them is ignorant.
For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can. Ask what this
notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to
itself, the caches or parts to their several selves temporally, the
all or whole to itself eternally. Different 'selves' thus break out
inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.
But how can what is _actually_ one be _effectively_ so many? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed,
in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be
distinct, for what is witnessed is different.
To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has so
troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme
example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their
constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from
these latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then of
course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from
other points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take it
as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given
me such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collective
experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical
with a lot of distributive experiences. They form two different
concepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experience
concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took
it as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage
of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just
as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective
experiences as to the absolute.
So now for the directer question. Shall we say that every complex
mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and
superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of
them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in
theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived,
and replace it by the 'God' of theism. We should also have to deny
Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of
experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be
compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed
in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the
incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing
and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.
I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other
pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them
unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves
and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held
me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation
was absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant
cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static
incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its
chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the
universe that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the
truer path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears the
voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to
spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the
veto?
Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.
Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded,
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting
in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's
sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but
our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties,
and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels
will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together.
This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It
is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not
for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial
soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies,
has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of
critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without exception all so barren
that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names
masquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten
zeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred
sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul'
does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years by
thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by
calling us pentadactyls. Souls have worn out both themselves and
their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the
manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the
word 'cause,' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks a
place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.
This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask
your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion
and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls may
get their innings again in philosophy--I am quite ready to admit that
possibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the human
mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the
soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which
humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will
be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance
that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as
he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more
seriously.
Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront what I just called
the residual dilemma. Can we, on the one hand, give up the logic
of identity?--can we, on the other, believe human experience to be
fundamentally irrational? Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we
must do one or the other.
Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity
of choosing between the 'horns' offered. Reality must be rational,
they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is
the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree
'somehow.' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the
dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a
pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of
the 'dialectic process.' Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic,
and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality
incarnate. But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must and
can be relief from _that_ irrationality; and the absolute must already
have got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us to
guess at. _We_ of course get no relief, so Bradley's is a rather
ascetic doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only they
emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for an
idealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more
sympathetically home to our imagination.
These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound
quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment. Only the
persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all
of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly
as a sort of programme. Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be
defended by later pleading.
I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. I
have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)
that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with
so very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of
philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of
simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively
young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not read
Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper
privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to
meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of
reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted
laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that
without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority
gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views
of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.
So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit
of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties
with which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all its possible consequences from any definition, and the logician
who is _unerbittlich consequent_ is often tempted, when he cannot
extract a certain property from a definition, to deny that the
concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess
that property. The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or
negate it. This is Hegel's regular method of establishing his system.
I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that
that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic
method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of
what can or cannot be.
But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have been
perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at
all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still
have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles and
the tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said--they
complicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of change
whatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time be
infinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles,
they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matter
how much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, however
minute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must first
have elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half
elapse _first_ leaves time with always something to do _before_ the
last thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done. Expressed
in bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus 1/4 plus
1/8..., of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply because it
is a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which approaches
it indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural world there
were no other way of getting things save by such successive addition
of their logically involved fractions, no complete units or whole
things would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would always
leave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs by
making first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc., and
adding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or none
at all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of
change, then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into being
before another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.
Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing
intellect solely. The times directly _felt_ in the experiences of
living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar
melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the
time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows
how long or how short it feels to the sugar? All _felt_ times coexist
and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice
of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal
confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale,
the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may
be resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out
the aboriginal privacy and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as
it were, and by each other. The notion of one objective and 'evenly
flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we
cut the processes of nature. They are now definitely contemporary,
or later or earlier one than another, and we can handle them
mathematically, as we say, and far better, practically as well as
theoretically, for having thus correlated them one to one with each
other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale.
This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in which
philosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition in
philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that
fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with
this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than
by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and
corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy,
and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application
of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras,
Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned,
for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their
hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have not
been consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; and
Bergson alone has been radical.
To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with that
of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have lately
mentioned. Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being
'critical,' on building in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure reason.
What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts do
not apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our senses
feed out to them. They give immutable intellectual forms to these
appearances, it is true, but the reality _an sich_ from which in
ultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever
unintelligible to our intellect. Take motion, for example. Sensibly,
motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount of
it, or none, being apprehended. This amount is the datum or _gabe_
which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellect
makes of it a task or _aufgabe_--this pun is one of the most memorable
of Kant's formulas--and insists that in every pulse of it an infinite
number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minor
pulses _we_ can indeed _go on_ to ascertain or to compute indefinitely
if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an
infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually
counted _themselves_ out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the
infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus
a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of
structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decompos_able_
ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which that
structure actually got composed we know nothing. Our intellect casts,
in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences _get
made_.
One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my own
experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie
in the word 'practical,' and far rather than stand out against you for
that word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson,
and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect,
provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or
scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired
to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge,
which is knowledge _about_ things, as distinguished from living or
sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of
reality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense
covers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameter
of space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does not
penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimension
of reality is occupied by the _activities_ that keep it going, but the
intellect, speaking through Hume, Kant & Co., finds itself obliged to
deny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligible
existence. What exists for _thought_, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along
the surfaces of space and time by _regeln der verkn�pfung_, laws of
nature which state only coexistences and successions.[1]
Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness
of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is
essential and permanent, not temporary.
What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the
conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness
can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
_d'embl�e_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions
are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only
an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.
What really _exists_ is not things made but things in the making. Once
made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual
decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself _in the
making_ by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the
whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your
possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of
them is the more absolutely true. Reality _falls_ in passing into
conceptual analysis; it _mounts_ in living its own undivided life--it
buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt the movement of
this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the
_devenir r�el_ by which the thing evolves and grows. Philosophy should
seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality,
not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead
results.
LECTURE VII
I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call upon
you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of
reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right
of concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like looking
downward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on its
belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and
gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything from
above. Philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above.
It doesn't simply feel the detail of things, it comprehends their
intelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categories
and rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point of
view of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsake
that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate
feeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion to
Aristotle and Plato, the leaven of T.H. Green probably works still
too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly.
Green more than any one realized that knowledge _about_ things was
knowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that our
sensational life could contain any relational element. He followed
the strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were not
expressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are not
defined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they could
get related together only by the action on them from above of a
'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that which
is related, but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is not
contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with
the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.'[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptual
objects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself
together. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary,
unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for
the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Were
there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be
'referred to,' there would be no significant names, but only noises,
and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless.[2] Green's
intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an
inevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he
had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy.
The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly,[3] and Green's
laborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen that
his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, and
then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy,--his belaboring of
poor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of the
sensible life _in concreto_ must see that relations of every sort, of
time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not,
are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as
disjunctive relations are.[4] This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction
from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so
often suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that
sensations are _disjoined_ only. Radical empiricism insists
that conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as
disjunctions are, and that relations, whether disjunctive or
conjunctive, are in their original sensible givenness just as fleeting
and momentary (in Green's words), and just as 'particular,' as terms
are. Later, both terms and relations get universalized by being
conceptualized and named.[5] But all the thickness, concreteness, and
individuality of experience exists in the immediate and relatively
unnamed stages of it, to the richness of which, and to the standing
inadequacy of our conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson so
emphatically calls our attention. And now I am happy to say that we
can begin to gather together some of the separate threads of our
argument, and see a little better the general kind of conclusion
toward which we are tending. Pray go back with me to the lecture
before the last, and recall what I said about the difficulty of seeing
how states of consciousness can compound themselves. The difficulty
seemed to be the same, you remember, whether we took it in psychology
as the composition of finite states of mind out of simpler finite
states, or in metaphysics as the composition of the absolute mind out
of finite minds in general. It is the general conceptualist difficulty
of any one thing being the same with many things, either at once or
in succession, for the abstract concepts of oneness and manyness must
needs exclude each other. In the particular instance that we have
dwelt on so long, the one thing is the all-form of experience, the
many things are the each-forms of experience in you and me. To call
them the same we must treat them as if each were simultaneously
its own other, a feat on conceptualist principles impossible of
performance.
If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular
predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of
states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for
purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle. Every smallest
state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own
definition. Only concepts are self-identical; only 'reason' deals with
closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in
her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with
reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the
rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its
overflow. In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each
of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own
body, of each other's persons, of these sublimities we are trying to
talk about, of the earth's geography and the direction of history,
of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?
Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your
pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they
to it. You can't identify it with either one of them rather than with
the others, for if you let it develop into no matter which of those
directions, what it develops into will look back on it and say, 'That
was the original germ of me.'
LECTURE VIII
CONCLUSIONS
Mr. Chesterton, I think, says somewhere, that the Greeks and Romans,
in all that concerned their moral life, were an extraordinarily solemn
set of folks. The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the
rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves
were apparently of much the same opinion. Cato's veracity was so
impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of
anything was to say, 'I would not believe it even if Cato had told
me.' Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hypocrisy,
which church-Christianity brought in, hardly existed; the naturalistic
system held firm; its values showed no hollowness and brooked no
irony. The individual, if virtuous enough, could meet all possible
requirements. The pagan pride had never crumbled. Luther was the first
moralist who broke with any effectiveness through the crust of all
this naturalistic self-sufficiency, thinking (and possibly he was
right) that Saint Paul had done it already. Religious experience of
the lutheran type brings all our naturalistic standards to bankruptcy.
You are strong only by being weak, it shows. You cannot live on pride
or self-sufficingness. There is a light in which all the naturally
founded and currently accepted distinctions, excellences, and
safeguards of our characters appear as utter childishness. Sincerely
to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's own right is
the only door to the universe's deeper reaches.
One may therefore plead, I think, that Fechner's ideas are not without
direct empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of life
which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but of
which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either
with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness
there is, or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in the
cosmos, but that it is discontinuous with our own. It has always been
a matter of surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute should
have shown so little interest in this department of life, and so
seldom put its phenomena in evidence, even when it seemed obvious that
personal experience of some kind must have made their confidence in
their own vision so strong. The logician's bias has always been too
much with them. They have preferred the thinner to the thicker method,
dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic than
the confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography.
Why cannot 'experience' and 'reason' meet on this common ground? Why
cannot they compromise? May not the godlessness usually but needlessly
associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a
theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely
taken? and may not rationalism, satisfied with seeing her _a priori_
proofs of God so effectively replaced by empirical evidence, abate
something of her absolutist claims? Let God but have the least
infinitesimal _other_ of any kind beside him, and empiricism and
rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace. Both
might then leave abstract thinness behind them, and seek together, as
scientific men seek, by using all the analogies and data within reach,
to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divine
consciousness concretely may be like. I venture to beg the younger
Oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative. Few men are
as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that
seem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, will leave the
thinner for the thicker path.
Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more so
when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it
monistically. We are indeed internal parts of God and not external
creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet
because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system
is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly
dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,--as similar to our
functions consequently.
Remember that one of our troubles with that was its essential
foreignness and monstrosity--there really is no other word for it than
that. Its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an essentially
heterogeneous _nature_ from ourselves. And this great difference
between absolutism and pluralism demands no difference in the
universe's material content--it follows from a difference in the form
alone. The all-form or monistic form makes the foreignness result, the
each-form or pluralistic form leaves the intimacy undisturbed.
No matter what the content of the universe may be, if you only allow
that it is _many_ everywhere and always, that _nothing_ real escapes
from having an environment; so far from defeating its rationality, as
the absolutists so unanimously pretend, you leave it in possession of
the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds.
Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional, and active, remain
fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands.
Monism, on the other hand, insists that when you come down to reality
as such, to the reality of realities, everything is present
to _everything_ else in one vast instantaneous co-implicated
completeness--nothing can in _any_ sense, functional or substantial,
be really absent from anything else, all things interpenetrate and
telescope together in the great total conflux.
Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of
the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can
set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:--Is the
manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we
inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you
must postulate that one-enormous-whole indivisibly as the _prius_
of there being any many at all--in other words, start with the
rationalistic block-universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?--or
can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in
oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued
into one another by intermediary terms--each one of these terms being
one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting
absolutely complete?
It shall be _held for true_, you decide; it _shall be_ as if true, for
_you_.
And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making
it securely true in the end.
Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which
monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions.
It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the
theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.
In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic
universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe
eternally complete.
I have now finished these poor lectures, and as you look back on them,
they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough. My only hope is
that they may possibly have proved suggestive; and if indeed they have
been suggestive of one point of method, I am almost willing to let
all other suggestions go. That point is that _it is high time for the
basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened
up_. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and
descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured
even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the
philosophic desert. Owing possibly to the fact that Plato and
Aristotle, with their intellectualism, are the basis of philosophic
study here, the Oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to have
confined itself too exclusively to thin logical considerations, that
would hold good in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empirical
constitution entirely different from ours. It is as if the actual
peculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to the
content of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philosophy
of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more
elaborately into account. I urge some of the younger members of
this learned audience to lay this hint to heart. If you can do so
effectively, making still more concrete advances upon the path which
Fechner and Bergson have so enticingly opened up, if you can gather
philosophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or pluralistic, from
the _particulars of life_, I will say, as I now do say, with the
cheerfullest of hearts, 'Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but
ring the fuller minstrel in.'
NOTES
LECTURE I
LECTURE II
Note 1, page 50.--The difference is that the bad parts of this finite
are eternal and essential for absolutists, whereas pluralists may hope
that they will eventually get sloughed off and become as if they had
not been.
LECTURE III
Note 7, page 115.--_The World and the Individual_, vol. ii, pp. 385,
386, 409.
Note 15, page 128.--Judging by the analogy of the relation which our
central consciousness seems to bear to that of our spinal cord, lower
ganglia, etc., it would seem natural to suppose that in whatever
superhuman mental synthesis there may be, the neglect and elimination
of certain contents of which we are conscious on the human level might
be as characteristic a feature as is the combination and interweaving
of other human contents.
LECTURE IV
LECTURE V
Note 2, page 184.--_The World and the Individual_, vol. ii, pp. 58-62.
LECTURE VI
Note 1, page 250.--For a more explicit vindication of the notion of
activity, see Appendix B, where I try to defend its recognition as
a definite form of immediate experience against its rationalistic
critics.
Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones,
conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or what not,
of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant.
This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called
a theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson's criticisms hold
good. Much as conception may tell us _about_ such invisible objects,
it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed,
our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less
instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned
in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a
solely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and molecules
may be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the
help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about
among our sensible experiences.
We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether
the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into
a logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse to
recognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that is
certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right
in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly
impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to
sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the
_whats_ as well as the _thats_ of reality, relational as well as
terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.
Yet the remoter unperceived _arrangements_, temporal, spatial, and
logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as
well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We may
call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need,
according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately
right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he
insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of
what we ought to know.
LECTURE VII
LECTURE VIII
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that
of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space,
and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together
without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in
some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with
some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one
space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently
in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are
abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as
they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.
II
III
In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the
logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking
a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to choose one in which the
letter _M_ should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which
noun, being related to _L_ by one of its parts and to _N_ by another,
would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both
relations. Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who weighed so many stone
by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the
doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover
no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then,
one might continue: 'Only an absolute is capable of uniting such a
non-identity.' We must, I say, avoid this sort of example; for the
dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations
universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns
collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples, we must take the
simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions.
Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic
conclusion![1] for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple
concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience
itself belies the paradox asserted. We use indeed two separate
concepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be
but substitutional, and that the _M_ in _L--M_ and the _M_ in _M--N_
_mean_ (_i.e._, are capable of leading to and terminating in) one
self-same piece, _M_, of sensible experience. This persistent identity
of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members--call
them what you will--of the experience-continuum, is just one of
those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so
emphatically. For samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible
structure. When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its
after-image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that same
bell-stroke.' When I see a thing _M_, with _L_ to the left of it and
_N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_; and if you tell me I
have had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a thousand
times, I should still _see_ it as a unit.[1] Its unity is aboriginal,
just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It
comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I encounter; they come
broken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity
and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom
why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily
understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite
experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare
postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the
region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I
say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all
that I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of
certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with
the words,--not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning
of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.
IV
For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that
one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in
many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic
difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and
_good_ is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently H.
Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us
that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one
of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to
yield, is rationally possible.
book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is created _pro hac
vice_, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It
is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so
external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism
in its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example,
we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could
get to _be_, and get into space at all, then they may have done so
separately. Once there, however, they are _additives_ to one another,
and, with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space-relations
may supervene between them. The question of how things could come
to be, anyhow, is wholly different from the question what their
relations, once the being accomplished, may consist in.
seem possible and even existing.... That you do not alter what you
compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious,
and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not
occur to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these
difficulties.... There is a relation in the result, and this relation,
we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what
does it make a difference? [_doesn't it make a difference to us
onlookers, at least?_] and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying
the terms by it? [_Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their
relative position_.[1]] If, in short, it is external to the terms, how
can it possibly be true _of_ them? [_Is it the 'intimacy' suggested by
the little word 'of,' here, which I have underscored, that is the root
of Mr. Bradley's trouble?_].... If the terms from their inner nature
do not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are concerned,
they seem related for no reason at all.... Things are spatially
related, first in one way, and then become related in another way, and
yet in no way themselves
[Footnote 1: But 'is there any sense,' asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly,
on p. 579, 'and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and
"about" things?' Surely such a question may be left unanswered.]
are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I
reply that, if so, I cannot _understand_ the leaving by the terms of
one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set. The
process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it
[_surely they contribute to it all there is 'of' it!_] seem irrational
throughout. [_If 'irrational' here means simply 'non-rational,'
or non-deducible from the essence of either term singly, it is no
reproach; if it means 'contradicting' such essence, Mr. Bradley should
show wherein and how_.] But, if they contribute anything, they must
surely be affected internally. [_Why so, if they contribute only their
surface? In such relations as 'on,' 'a foot away,' 'between,' 'next,'
etc., only surfaces are in question_.] ... If the terms contribute
anything whatever, then the terms are affected [_inwardly altered?_]
by the arrangement.... That for working purposes we treat, and do well
to treat, some relations as external merely, I do not deny, and that
of course is not the question at issue here. That question is ...
whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [_i.e.,
a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their
nature simultaneously_] is possible and forced on us by the facts.'[1]
Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered: _und
zwar_ 'so far.' But just _how_ far is the whole problem; and
'through-and-through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat
undecided utterances[1])
VI
says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if
I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside
_A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction
'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in
neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply
unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of
togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer
me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more
than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my
intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its
nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).
Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power
by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give
due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and
amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its
behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he
elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of
transition, but says that
[Footnote 1: The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions,
not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience
gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is
the puzzle.]
APPENDIX B
in a review of Stout,[1] hauls him over the coals at great length for
defending 'efficacy' in a way which I, for one, never gathered from
reading him, and which I have heard Stout himself say was quite
foreign to the intention of his text.
Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of
activity present to us.
This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist
that for an experient to be at all is to be active. It seems to
justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression that we
_are_ only as we are active,[1]
[Footnote 1: _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii, p. 245. One thinks
naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_
here.]
or the _fundirte inhalt_ (or as whatever else you may please to call
the conjunctive form) which the content falls into when we experience
it in the ways which the describers set forth. Those factors in those
relations are what we _mean_ by activity-situations; and to the
possible enumeration and accumulation of their circumstances and
ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound. Every hour of
human life could contribute to the picture gallery; and this is the
only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry--where is
it going to stop? Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of
what we have already in concrete form in our own breasts?[1]
They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts
already--less spread out and separated, to be sure--but we knew them
still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as 'the expansion
of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle';
and the following out of such a definition through a multitude of
cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise
in synonymic speech.
Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we had
successfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to be
permitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we had
been really active, that we had met real resistance and had really
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that is
necessary is to _gelten_ as an entity, to operate, or be felt,
experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such. In our
activity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils Lotze's demand.
It makes itself _gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what
activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours,
it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either
lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic
shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles
and overcoming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means here is
clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one
else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to beings
with ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of
experience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture. If there is
anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity,
but should get itself another name.
The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of
mind of one possessed by it is often something like this: 'It is
all very well,' we may imagine him saying, 'to talk about certain
experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as
they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do
so; suppose that what we feel is a will to stand a strain. Does our
feeling do more than _record_ the fact that the strain is sustained?
The _real_ activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what
is the doing made of before the record is made? What in the will
_enables_ it to act thus? And these trains of experience themselves,
in which activities appear, what makes them _go_ at all? Does the
activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being? As an
empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity
to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation
experienced between bits of experience already made. But what made
them at all? What propels experience _�berhaupt_ into being? _There_
is the activity that _operates_; the activity _felt_ is only its
superficial sign.'
The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents, and that
resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.
You see it is the old dispute come back! Materialism and teleology;
elementary short-span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or far
foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.
I said awhile back (p. 381) that I should return to the 'metaphysical'
question before ending; so, with a few words about that, I will now
close my remarks.
The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They all
are problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name
traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider
activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do
the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they
exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them
and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity-process
and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same
muscular movement, does the mental process steer the neural processes
or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit
their effects? Such are the questions that we must begin with. But so
far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions,
that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that
region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors
Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and
interesting a way. The results of these authors seem in many respects
dissimilar, and I understand them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot
help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising,
and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.
APPENDIX C
INDEX
Absolute, the, 49, 108-109, 114 ff., 173, 175, 190 ff., 203, 271, 292 ff.,
311; not the same as God, 111, 134; its rationality, 114 f.; its
irrationality, 117-129; difficulty of conceiving it, 195.
Absolutism, 34, 38, 40, 54, 72 f, 79, 122, 310. See Monism.
Analogy, 8, 151 f.
Angels, 164.
ARISTIDES, 304.
BAILEY, S., 5.
'Between,' 70.
Brain, 160.
CATO, 304.
Compounding of mental states, 168, 173, 186 f., 268, 281, 284, 292, 296.
Confluence, 326.
Conflux, 257.
Consciousness, superhuman, 156, 310 f.; its compound nature, 168, 173,
186 f., 289.
Contradiction, in Hegel, 89 f.
Death, 303.
Degrees, 74.
Difference, 257 f.
Earth-soul, 152 f.
Endosmosis, 257.
Evil, 310.
'Faith-ladder,' 328.
Foreignness, 31.
HEGEL, Lecture III, _passim_, 11, 85, 207, 211, 219, 296. His vision,
88, 98 f., 104; his use of double negation, 102; his vicious
intellectualism 106; Haldane on, 138; McTaggart on, 140; Royce on, 143.
Horse, 265.
Identity, 93.
Indeterminism, 77.
Infinity, 229.
Interaction, 56.
Intimacy, 31.
LEIBNITZ, 119.
Life, 523.
Log, 323.
LUTHER, 304.
Monism, 36, 117, 125, 201, 313, 321 f.; Fechner's, 153. See Absolutism.
Monomaniacs, 78.
Newton, 260.
PHOCION, 304.
Plant-soul, 165 f.
Polytheism, 310.
Relating, 7.
RITCHIE, 72.
ROYCE, 61 f., 115, 173, 182 f., 197, 207, 212, 265, 296.
Science, 145.
Sensations, 279.
Socialism, 78.
SOCRATES, 284.
'Some,' 79.
Sphinx, 22.
SPINOZA, 47.
Theism, 24.
Time, 232.
ZENO, 228.
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